It is time for the High School years and we will focus on that. Including my daughter's plans and interests as they prepare to leave the nest. In the past we have used Waldorf, Montessori, Lapbooking and TWTM in our homeschool and I will leave the working links up.

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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Online Charter Schools--Do they Scare You?

I recieved in the mail yesterday a nice little catalog for a free online charter school starting in my state. This school will supply you with quality texts from Calvert and give you the support of a certified teacher. They even give you a computer so that you can do all of the great online curriculum helps as well.

Sounds great doesn't it? A high quality curriculum like Calvert, a computer and online curriculum--all for Free.

But like my friend said these schools are wolves in sheeps clothing. They draw you in with all this free curriculum but in exchange you have to report to a certified teacher and follow their lesson plans. They lure parents into thinking that they are homeschooling when they are actually doing public school a home.

They also threaten our freedoms to homeschool as we are wont to do. In some states you sign a form stating that you will remove God from your homeschooling time. They open the door to greater regulation of homeschooling.

For example, I live in one of the best states to homeschool. We are able to do basically whatever we want but the media has been attacking us in the past few years asking for greater regulation. Now, here along comes the charter school. What would happen if this school is a great success not neccessarily with parents who are already homeschooling but parents wanting to flee the regular school system. And then the media decides this charter school is so great they start a campaign to make it a requirement that if you homeschool you have to do it through the charter.

Now I can see that they could be helpful for children who are having trouble in public school classrooms but the parents are not secure enough in themselves to just homeschool. The online charter could be great for that but not at the expense of my freedom to homeschool as I chose.